The Living Room > summer in my head

Ai Childress
Ai Childress

Color Bars (Happy)
2014
vintage paper collage, watercolor pencil on hardboard panel



Ideas It’s not easy to take all of your thoughts and distill them down to but a few, remain with them, and develop them with devotion and affection. Most of the time it’s a constant stream of invasive ideas that assault from every direction: what I see, what I read, what I do, what I play, what I eat, what I dream. Ideas are constantly at battle inside my head, and I’m slowly learning to only entertain those that come out on top again and again. Then again, sometimes an idea hits you with enough ambition and absurdity that you have to notice it, like making a bed out of frozen butter in the shape of a light bulb that you document yourself sleeping on—reposing on it until you soften it enough to melt into it (and title “Sometimes my best ideas come when I’m not thinking too hard.”). However, I mostly use ideas that wait patiently and raise their hands when I slow down and quiet myself. It seems these are the ideas that are most true to me. For those I keep small notebooks and scraps of paper around to record brief conceptual leanings and any material and/or organizational concerns.